The Spoken Word has recently been involved in providing technological support to a class that is part of the MA in Multimedia Journalism based at Glasgow Caledonian University. The class is run by Claire Dean who is a former reporter at STV’s Scotland Today programme.

The Spoken Word has set up blogs for the each of the students in the class and has introduced them to various new media tools that are currently being used such as tagging, live updating through twitter and polling.

Today’s session of the class included a talk and question and answer session given by Kyle MacRae. Kyle is co-founder of the website Scoopt. Scoopt is an online service that allows members of the public to upload their photos on to the site in the hope that the Scoopt staff can sell the image to news agencies from around the world. The idea for the website came to Kyle after watching the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami that took place on Boxing Day 2004 and the lack of images that the media could source of the event.

It was interesting to hear about Kyle’s experiences both generally and from the point of view of the work that the Spoken Word carries out – specifically in relation to the various rights clearance issues that he has encountered.

Scoopt has now been bought over by Getty Images but despite this Kyle believes that citizen journalism still has not found its feet in the online world. It appears that there is still some way to go before public input is fully embraced by the giants of the media world.

After 114 days of captivity the BBC news journalist Alan Johnston was released by his captors on Wednesday 4th July 2007. However on the 8th August another important anniversary will take place that is closely linked to Alan Johnston’s ordeal. This is the anniversary of Britain’s longest-held hostage John McCarthy’s release from militants in Lebanon after more than five years in captivity. Our repository has a small collection of media featuring John McCarthy including an episode of the Radio 4 programme ‘Excess Baggage’ in which he speaks with three other journalists and writers about their experiences in the Middle East.

• EXCESS BAGGAGE – MIDDLE EAST
• BBC BREAKFAST NEWS
• THE TOURIST – WAYS OF ESCAPE
• LINK TO BBC: ON THIS DAY 8th August 1991

David Donald has been invited to share his expertise with Northwestern graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism, Sciences Po in Paris.

Sciences Po is an undergraduate and graduate education doctoral school and research centre in Paris with a library and documentation and publishing services.

David will talk with the students about various new media issues including blogging, audio, video, and interactive web applications for journalism. He will concentrate on teaching students how to use blog applications for the first time and outline the digital audio and video work done on the Spoken Word project which will be extremely useful for journalists interested in furthering their knowledge of web based broadcasting.

Photo(c): Courtesy of ‘That Ambitious Girl’